


Into the Vast

by TF Grognon (gloss)



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Mermaids, Reference to Drug Use, Schwarzschild radius, but IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE, poetic abuse of quantum physics, space lesbians, space travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 06:45:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/TF%20Grognon
Summary: A bored and embittered space stewardess meets a star mermaid. Novae ensue.





	Into the Vast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kisuru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kisuru/gifts).



> thanks to L. for humoring me and helping me with this

They were half a standard annual cycle out from Yerk, bound for an as-yet unnamed colony, with stops at several tourist destinations, when everything went to hell. The _Hontamini_ was a small vessel, back-converted from cargo to carry ten passengers (of average humanoid size) and four crew (ditto). There were, however, just three crew members and five passengers, one of whom was an embryo in stasis. Their captain was almost as bad at selling tickets as he was at interpersonal communication and staying awake without stim-shots.

The passages were even narrower than they appeared, all the corners rounded out to allow more space behind, for cargo and passenger cabins. A crick in her neck and knot high in one hip formed within a standard day. By the time they reached the new colony, she expected to be bent double and constantly groaning.

Roos never could shake the feeling that they were still cargo, crammed into this can and flung out from the homeworld. Half-empty as the ship was, no wonder her thoughts rattled around her skull like this.

"You're so ridiculous," Jacques, the first mate, said when she told him that. She'd reached that part of getting stoned where she was sharing a little too much and feeling treacherously affectionate. 

They were crouched in the storage compartment off the cramped crew lounge sharing a bidi and exhaling into the vents like they were kids back in school. He switched the bidi to his other hand and smirked. "Besides, you're insult my finely-honed, highly in-demand navigation skills."

"Please." She snorted. "Your nav skills consist of doing what the computer tells you."

"Sometimes I push buttons, thank you very much," he said. "Two at once, even. You done with this?"

"Give me another drag." She sucked on the end of the bidi until the ember flared, then crushed it out between thumb and forefinger.

Jacques whistled. "You're so butch."

"Not really," she said, tugging down the stupid miniskirt of her uniform as she stood. It barely covered her ass and the fabric was some cheap synth that grabbed onto anything and puckered, just for the hell of it. "It's just relative. Quantum, even."

She got this job because she filled out the uniform. That was fine, she'd told herself, whatever it took to get up and into the vast. Once she was there, she'd prove herself, become indispensable, get integrated into the crew until they were a family better than any down on the rocks.

He shoved her lightly, laughing. "Go get some rest. You're off, aren't you?"

Roos shrugged. "Technically."

He fake-punched her shoulder. "So get some technical sleep. If he needs you, you'll know about it."

"True."

The thought of lying down in her bunk, however, made her shudder. She'd be a speck in a scrap of metal floating in the dark, open vast. She followed Jacques back toward the helm.

"Really want to see some button-pushing," she said when he glanced back at her, the question _what're you doing?_ all over his face. "Impress me, hot shot."

"Be my guest." He took his seat and brought up a viz screen. Data scrolled upward, endlessly. 

This helm was nothing like the cockpit in the little air-buzzers she'd learned to fly on in childhood. In an emergency, she'd be no help whatsoever, despite the fact that she'd listed "extensive post-atmo flight experience" on her resume. (Finding herself out of range due to a hazing prank gone wrong totally counted as extensive experience. Her ordeal had even made the sector news-scroll for half a cycle.)

She had to wedge herself between the bulkhead and the out-thrust of backup intelligence cells. There was barely room here for the two seats and flight controls.

"...the _hell_?" Jacques muttered. She leaned over the back of his padded seat to see what he was talking about. His viz screen wavered, its projection faulty enough that it made her a little nauseous to look at. 

The data danced over the screen, amber and green characters leaving effervescent trails as they moved. The rhythm was captivating; her pulse and thoughts began to move along, to accompany inaudible, unheard music.

"What?" she asked when Jacques swore again. She shook her head; the bidi was really getting to her if she was hearing things.

He hushed her, viciously, and held up his hand to tell her further to stay quiet. _Get fucked_ , she almost said; she didn't have to take being treated like this. She really did dislike flight-jockeys and all their egotism and smug arrogance and unearned respect. Try serving drinks to inebriated humanoids while keeping a smile on your face and your tits _and_ ass out of their reach, then maybe you'd have call to be arrogant. Worse, make up their cabins and clean their disgusting lavatories and _still_ manage to smile at them the next time: you should be made Governor-Admiral of this and all neighboring sectors.

Jacques kept one hand cupped to his ear, his head cocked, but the rest of his posture slackened. His eyes drifted halfway closed as his free hand floated toward one control panel. He hummed along with the data, a wide, sleepy smile on his lips. 

"What are you doing?" Roos demanded. She grabbed his shoulder and shook, but he didn't react. He depressed three buttons, one after the other, and smiled as he slumped back. The ship banked hard, tossing her against the intelligence cells, dislodging a few.

After that, Roos waited. Nothing more happened that she could perceive. Maybe the engines sped up, but out here in the dark, there was no way of marking any change. The floor beneath her high-heeled boots tilted slightly, but this was an old ship. It rarely flew level.

They could be upside down and plunging toward a kilonova, but there'd be no way to know until it was too late.

She heard her breath scraping out her mouth as if she were somewhere else. It sang in tune with the data, with Jacques, with the silence.

Then the captain came thundering down the passage, cursing and punching the bulkhead as he approached, and Roos returned to her senses. Her first reasonable thought was, _damn it, I'm so stoned and it was my bidi, I'm so screwed if he finds out_. Like all red-blooded, right-thinking macho starfarers, Captain Vilm respected the stimulants and loathed the relaxants.

"Move, girl!" He shoved her aside and jabbed thick fingers all over the controls. Screen after viz screen glowed into being while the volume on the communications channels rose higher and higher. A series of low, whistling beeps began to fill the room before he killed the feed.

Something banged into the hull. Not the usual, occasional hit from random debris; this was immense and staggering. The impact knocked her back into the passage. By the time she'd gotten back to her feet, her head swimming and throat clenching, there were three or four more thudding collisions, each accompanied by the captain's curses.

"Quarters, girl," he barked. " _That's an order_."

"The passengers—" 

He glanced over his shoulder; his nose was bleeding freely, but he either didn't care or hadn't noticed. "Cryo-nap, all of 'em. You'd do well to join them."

"Sir—" She tried to stand up straight and speak without a quaver in her voice. "Let me help. I can—"

"Quarters," he said. "Unless you'd prefer the vast. Up to you, so long as you get the fuck out of my cockpit."

Rage and humiliation shot through her, equally hot and poisonous. Her mouth opened, but what would she have said? He'd all but threatened to put her on the wrong side of an airlock.

She traced her way back to the crew quarters and her tiny bunk. With all the passengers forced unconscious and the captain and first mate otherwise occupied, there wasn't much for her to do. On her back in the bunk, feet up on the bulkhead to try to relieve the ache of wearing the boots all shift, she lit another bidi and exhaled slowly.

The sweet narcotic smoke wove around her and above her. She couldn't help but think of star trails and constellations, all the journeys she'd planned and dreamed through as a kid. One wave of her hand and the smoke dispersed.

*

They drifted for nearly a standard day.

When the _Hontamini_ managed to put in at Mining Station #729-N, it was at half-power, trailing a long noxious cloud of bio-waste and spent fuel capsules. The captain holed up with port and customs officials, awaiting the arrival of the nearest sentry who could be spared. 

"We were assailed and entrapped! _Lured_!" Captain Vilm had bellowed over open channels to anyone who'd listen. "War! This is a new front!"

A new front, Roos replied to the bulkhead above her face, in an entirely dead war, one whose hostilities had fizzled a generation or two before the captain was born.

Jacques, like the passengers, was out. She wondered if she should be surprised that Vilm had overlooked her, but she knew that the reason was probably quite simple. She wasn't worth the cryo-gas it would take to fill her bunk.

Once they were docked and Vilm had departed, Roos left the ship, intent on exploring on her own. It wasn't likely that this half-empty mining installation could offer much better in the way of food and drink than she was used to, but at least it would, probably, be _different_ mediocre stuffs. 

She stumbled a few times. The station's grav gyros, though terribly loud, generated a much smoother field than she'd grown used to. It was like stepping off a rubble-strewn cobblestone path into a swift, clear river—a definite improvement, but one that still required adjustment.

The station's lights were dim, reducing everything to the same soft gray; if a droning buzz had a color, it was this. She circled the entire docking bay before she realized what was happening. The only option in the way of food and drink was the standard prefab fonda just off the bay. These were the same all over, so familiar she could probably serve herself and consume her meal with her eyes closed and never trip nor spill a drop. Five stools at a counter and three different dispensing apparatuses, plus two narrow tables tucked into a viewport that bulged like a blister overlooking the vast.

One moment, she was leaning into the viewport, forehead on its cold surface, letting her thoughts drift out into the vast. 

The next, goosebumps broke out over her skin as something blue-white flickered in the corner of her eye.

Roos turned to see a woman, enormously tall and slender, sitting on the last stool. She had her elbow on the counter, her cheek in her hand, and she was looking Roos over in that unmistakable way of _appraisal_ , the same in any system. Elaborate, frosty locs were piled atop her head and her dress appeared to sparkle and steam.

Roos checked the reflection in the viewport. There, the figure resembled a comet: a bright head that streamed down into a forked tail, one of dust, one of glowing gas.

"Can I buy you a drink?" the woman asked. Her voice was low and lulling; Roos all but drifted over to join her.

"Roos," she said, holding out her hand. The woman took it, her own hand cold and rough to the touch. Her skin, like her dress, appeared to be coated with chips of ice and bits of debris, pebbles and sprays of gravel. "You are?" 

The woman didn't answer, but tugged on Roos's hand until Roos sat facing her on the next stool.

"Dressed like a starmaid, huh?" Roos tried. When she was on her game, she could out-flirt just about any woman she set her sights on. "Suits you."

"It should," she replied. "I am."

Roos laughed and reached over to punch in an order for two drinks. She used Jacques's credit chip and promised, at least in her heart, to make it up to him. If she had to. "Cute."

"I am, yes."

"Cute?"

"Also a starmaid."

Every schoolkid the settled galaxies over, even those who, like Roos, left after the mandatory six years, knew the basics of astronav. Light bends along curves near massive objects; so does spacetime at a radius easily calculable. The equation for _that_ had been passed down for centuries. Nursery rhymes sang it, creche games skipped to its rhythm. 

Even these days, when she was on leave and hungover and trying to remember the name of whichever lovely lady shared her bunk, Roos could sing 2GM/c2.

Likewise, she knew all the stories about starmaids, wicked lost souls who perched on the event horizons of black holes and lured starfarers. Misogynistic bullshit, Roos had decided years ago, as stupid and hurtful as other stories like the fog-ghost who wailed in the mountains and punished men for her lost fertility and the pheromone vampire who fucked for fun and drained the righteous.

"All right," Roos replied. "Interesting line of work."

The woman smiled, but to herself, the expression private and illegible. Her lips were navy-blue and plush, her skin dusky. Roos handed her a drink and sipped at her own.

"Or is it more of a calling?" Roos asked.

"Tell me something," the starmaid said.

"Anything."

"What brings you out into the vast?"

Roos shrugged. "That's a huge cliche, isn't it?"

She batted her lashes. "Is it?"

"It is."

"But it's just a simple question," she said. "A straightforward inquiry after facts. After all—" She set down her drink and rested her chin in her palm, turning her gaze directly on Roos. "I want to get to know you better."

Roos laughed at that, warmth seeping through her. "Sure you do."

"I do."

"So tell me how you became a starmaid."

"Oh, _that._ That," she said as she topped up their drinks, sounding as bored as could be, "Is the usual story. Grief, and error, and regret."

"Oh." Roos looked down into her drink; her own wavering face peered back at her. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She put her free hand on Roos's knee. "The grief and error and regret weren't _mine_."

"What am I supposed to call you?" Roos asked suddenly, the need to know surprising her. "I can't just...'the starmaid' this and that..."

"What do you want to call me?"

"It doesn't work like that."

"Doesn't it?" 

"Whatever I want, that's what you are?" Roos asked.

"Sedna," the starmaid said. "How's that?"

When she blinked, her long lashes glittered, each hair heavy with ice and grit and starlight. But it was her eyes that kept Roos fascinated; sometimes they were black and intent, others glinting with blue and green. But they were always as empty as the vast itself, swallowing up the wan light of the fonda. She squeezed Roos's knee. "Goodness, you're _warm_."

Sedna's hand was more than cold against Roos's skin. It burned a little, it was that frigid. When she squeezed, the cold went deeper into Roos, leaving a transitory warmth behind. Roos bit her lip and wiggled in her seat, enough to part her knees slightly and bring the starmaid's hand around to the inner curve of her thigh.

She smiled back at Roos, showing teeth like icicles, like chips of stone. When Roos thought of those cold fingers, or a tongue even colder, smooth and freezing, inside of her, she had to shift in her seat.

"Delicious," Sedna said and raised her glass to Roos, toasting her, before drinking it down in one long swallow. Her nails pressed, hard and sharp, into Roos's thigh.

"What is?"

"Oh, come now," Sedna said. "You. Your ideas. I want to taste you."

To dispel the fear that clutched, sudden and relentless, at the base of her skull, Roos tried to list the few xeno-species believed or proven to have psychic abilities. 

"I'm as human as you," she said, then laughed at herself, the sound low and private and _intimate_. "Well. I used to be. But things change."

"Grief and error?" Roos asked. She was scared, and intrigued, and when she tried to stand, the leg that the starmaid had been touching buckled under her, gone numb.

"Yes," she replied, standing as well. She towered over Roos, and the braids coiled and piled above her head added half a meter to her height. The twin tails, one gas, one dust, spun around themselves as she stood. They appeared to stream on and on, though the fonda was as narrow and utilitarian as the rest of the station.

Roos's thoughts wavered, too, between what was possible and what she was seeing with her own eyes. The juxtaposition was enough to set her off-balance, a little nauseous. Quantum queasiness was a real enough phenomenon, and it was swamping her now.

That was when she remembered where she'd heard Sedna's voice.

"You called our ship, didn't you?"

To her credit, Sedna neither protestd nor excused. Rather, she winked at Roos and wound her arm around Roos's waist. "As smart as you are warm and beautiful."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you...? Jacques, he's comatose, you know that? We could have _died_ —"

She shrugged one shoulder, tossing back the braids that crowded over her eyes. "But you didn't."

"But—"

"And here you are anyway, so—" She bent and whispered, cold lips right at Roos's ear, "It's a happy ending all the same."

"They think it's the war again."

"Of course they do." She laughed, the low, throbbing noise shivering right through Roos. "They can't imagine any other way."

"Luring someone to kill them isn't war?"

She pulled back, but didn't release her hold on Roos. Her back bent at an impossible angle and everything around, _of_ , her glowed blue and bright. "What do you think?"

Roos should have wanted to shout, shove the thing away from herself, run as fast as she could back to the narrow coffin that made up her bunk. She knew that was what she _ought_ to do; all the logic, everything she'd ever been told, argued for exactly that. Reject and fight and refuse.

Instead, she went up on the tips of her toes and, somehow (impossibly possibly), found the starmaid's mouth with her own. Kissed her until they were stumbling together, against a wall, overturning a stool, until she had the starmaid before her, moaning like tundra wind into her mouth. Until she had one of Sedna's thighs between her own and a set of icy claws creeping under her breast, until she was shivering and thrusting and kissing as hard as she could, tasting everything dark and cold and lonely and powerful.

Sedna bit at Roos's chin, at her lower lip, and raised and lowered her knee so Roos rode it, ground against it.

"So warm," she groaned, burying her face between Roos's breasts, holding her up off the floor and bucking against her through one orgasm, then another, bursts of light and heat that left Roos gasping. Sedna held her fast, actually _moved_ her back and forth, rubbing up another burst of incandescent pleasure, and then a fourth, and when Roos begged her to stop, she laughed. "Is that what you really want?"

Roos didn't know, couldn't say; frost trailed and sparkled over her sweaty, flushed skin, and the contrast made her ache, made her hunger for more, and sharper, sensation. She screamed in relief when Sedna slid two, then three, fingers inside her hot, aching hole, then found her rear entrance and penetrated that, too. The cold went to Roos's core, spun her around dizzyingly fast. All the while, Sedna kissed at her breasts, drew her nipples up hard and cold, licked her way back to Roos's mouth.

"Pretty little thing," she crooned. "So hot, so full of need."

"Let me—" Roos shuddered, teeth chattering, and pawed awkwardly at the maid's cold, gritty skin. "How do I get you off? What do I do?"

The smile she got was full of teeth and bright as anything, blue lips and vast-dark skin. "Show me your ship." 

*

Twin lights, spun around each other, calling through the dark, offering whatever you want, if you're just brave enough to _ask_.


End file.
